Hamline Undergraduate Student Congress (HUSC) is in full swing after an intense election. HUSC was looking to fill the spots of three first-year representatives, one junior representative, a representative for every dorm hall on campus, one commuter representative, along with three appointed positions that were chosen after the formal election process.

With 21 spirited candidates running to be first-year representatives, the election encouraged first-years to come up with some creative campaigns to make themselves stand out. 

“We knew that the priority was posters because people would be like ‘Oh, I saw your face in GLC’,” first-year representative Anthony Meng said. “But we needed to differentiate ourselves because there were so many candidates.”

Meng and his campaign team decided to use social media as a campaigning platform and attached a QR code to his posters that linked students to his Facebook page and Instagram account @Mengo4HUSC. 

Despite there being so many candidates, the competition was friendly. 

“It was a fun competitiveness that, like, sometimes turned into cattiness,” Meng said. “But it was a good energy.”

“These freshmen are so eager and so excited,” sophomore and HUSC Public Relations Chair, Evelyn Humphrey said. “They’re so brilliant and they all seem so prepared. They have great campaigns, and they really care about campus.”

Some students even decided to doorknock around the dorms.

“I was like, you don’t have to doorknock if you don’t want to, but I know a number of candidates did because they just wanted [to be on HUSC] so much,” said junior and HUSC Vice President Dieu Do. “This new class of first-years and transfers have very high potential. I can see them being great agents of change and trailblazers for the next couple of generations to come because they are already, from the get-go, so excited.”

When it came time for the actual elections, there were a few technical errors that prohibited over 140 student votes from being counted.

“Tuesday morning we ran into some technical difficulties,” Do said. “The google form that we use for voting wasn’t collecting the individuals emails. We wanted to collect emails to verify that they were Hamline students. Out of preserving the fairness and integrity of the elections, we decided that we should discard the 140-some votes.”

HUSC then took action to encourage students to re-vote if they had voted before 12:32pm on Tuesday, Sept. 16, before the problem was noticed.

“Everything was handled so well by the executive board and we were able to work through it and make sure that we would preserve the integrity of the election,” Do said. “Our Political Affairs Committee Chair, Maddie Gaffney, was phenomenal.”

Results were announced on Monday, Sept. 23 by email and those who are newly elected are eager to take on their new roles.

“I can’t wait to advocate. I can’t wait to create a better Hamline and I’m going to take this experience with a bunch of humility,” Meng said. “I’m completely thankful for all my voters and they have really humbled me and really taught me a lot.”

Now Hamline will have to wait and see what these new HUSC representatives have in store for the campus community.

“I really hope that these students stick,” Humphrey said. “I hope that they really love it and they fall in love with HUSC.”